A good deal of what my team does is develop customer- (or partner-) facing web sites. We collect a bunch of data, and we run several different reports. We're still discovering ways of doing "data mining" to spot trends, analyze usage, stuff like that.
One of the handful of newsletters I get is Harvard Business Review's "Working Knowledge". If you're not one of those that's popped the $118 for a subscription to HBR--well worth the investment in your career in my opinion (or have access to it on Factiva), you can get some good summaries of some of the best articles from this free newsletter. Always something thought-provoking.
Don?t Get Buried in Customer Data?Use It
"By the end of the decade, many marketers had come to believe that the combination of mass customization techniques, sophisticated database software, and the Internet would enable them to actually deliver on the promise of customized offerings to each individual customer.
But that hasn't happened to the extent it should have, says Cleveland-based consultant James H. Gilmore, coauthor with B. Joseph Pine II of The Experience Economy (Harvard Business School Press, 1999), because "most practitioners have taken the concept of one-to-one marketing and bastardized it into CRM. They're using CRM tools to design better processes for a nonexistent 'average' customer, instead of customizing for individual customers."
He cites the example of a major hotel chain that asks guests to complete a multiple-question satisfaction survey via their room's TV set during their stay. When one guest answered "extremely dissatisfied" to all the questions, he was not treated any differently when he checked out. Why? Because his answers went straight to a central repository where they were aggregated with other customers' responses and used to measure overall market?not customer?satisfaction. A more effective approach would be to feed his answers directly to someone at the front desk who could respond immediately to his needs and create a better experience for him.
"A company's goal should be to learn more about what each customer needs so that it can close the customer sacrifice gap, which is the difference between what individual customers settle for and what each wants exactly," says Gilmore. Steve Cunningham, director of customer listening at Cisco, agrees that it's vital to listen and respond to individual customer needs and preferences. But he believes you must also pay attention to the aggregate data?customer averages based on individual surveys."
There's definitely more we can do, and I'm really looking forward to the flexibility some upcoming web services and tools are going to provide our team.
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